(no subject)

[wytchcroft]

and the olive saltiness of your kiss has been never lost across the years,
that rich and savoury taste still flavouring my memory -
and a mind over time forgets so many things, so many pains; the cramps of flu, the scouring of measles,
mumps and all the foolish fleshly ailments of youth, the grip of a hand as the dentist whirrs the drill,
all gone, all loosed like leaves blown upward by a bonfire -
and gone. 

But not the pleasure - never the pleasure -
it stays,
across the tastebuds,
lying back with a smile - you knew the richness offered,
you knew, there in your smile, liquid as the wine we'd been drinking, heady and sweet.

And every real time is the first time - bringing back the passion and the anger and the hot gasps of love
and the tender moments where a kiss was simply the quick shifting of a laughing eye
- your eye catching mine - like the sun off a moving car, glittering from the rainy grey of a school yard
- innocent kisses -
running with the others with a wild yell of incoherent joy, the chase and the laughter and the bursting through reality to drink down those kisses...
stood in the centre of a ring and I can still hear them singing, 'wobbling like jelly', the favourite silly song...
or were we racing down the back alleys on a wild run for the promise of a kiss, the children and their games,
...  all so easy to recall.

Or the dappled shadows of a summer garden
in the long afternoons, kissing idly beside the rusted iron frame,
easing our sun sore lips and smelling of the sea and the sandy coves.

And then (how many years?) later - the swollen features of a leering teen,
leaning through the door-frame of the Paris hotel to ask me,
"Did you get to first base yet?"
slurring those new words with an adolescent relish.

What?
First -what?

First time I'd heard the phrase - that wretched phrase -
and the girl he meant
was half crazy for a friend of mine
so I'd pulled her from a razor blade just fifteen minutes before
and now she was sleeping and this boy was...

having the door shut in his face -
and I checked her breathing and I checked her pulse and I checked the bandage and I -

grabbed my cigarettes and a bottle of whiskey and climbed out the window to the fire-escape
and down into the city and free.

And I found myself some company - racing with her away from the angry policemen,
dashing down the metro steps and along the platform
just like the back alleys of before, the back alleys of home.

And I found myself a place to sleep 

and food to eat

and it wasn't you with me

but still

there were kisses into the dawn

and it's your memory that awakes them.